Skills of the Future

I enjoy thinking about what the future will require from humans in terms of skills. With computers taking more and more from us, and humans having fewer and fewer jobs (just because so much will be automated), the question is simple:

What jobs will still be dominated by humans vs. computers?

It really does put some focus on the “what career should I get into?” Normally it’s considered a question of how can you compete best with other humans, but now we need to be asking how we’re going to compete with machines.

Creativity is key

The answer reduces nicely to creativity, as this is probably the highest bar that can exist for computers. Once computers can be highly creative, and match or exceed humans in doing so, we’ll likely have already passed a major marker (like the singularity) in terms of computer development.

And at that point guessing the future becomes purely speculative.

This article captures a piece of this quite well, and I’ll capture a few main points below.

Getting people’s attention is what’s hard to do, and computers aren’t good at that. Careers that focus on this (like marketing) will continue to thrive

Now that we’re inundated with information, the hard part is going to be sorting through it and focusing on what’s important. Similar to my post here, being able to find and communicate good data-based narratives will be critical.

Applying yourself is much more difficult than having ideas, and those that can do it will have an advantage. Expect to see a focus on growing that skill.

Another major skill will be knowing when to listen to computers and when to go “analog” and creative. The times that are best to do each will not be intuitive.